A.I. Young

A.I. Young has been remembered by Lincolnville oldtimers as a "character", locally renowned for riding his cow in Camden parades. He lived on Slab City Road, near the saw mill at the outlet of Coleman Pond. Though he had two daughters, Etta and Ida, he apparently was living alone in 1872 when he kept this journal. The little book came to the Historical Society in the mail one day with this explanation:

It was 1965 and a California family, along with their 13-year-old son, drove across country to spend the summer in a rented house on a pond in Lincolnville. The boy, with time on his hands, and a country neighborhood to explore, wandered around and discovered, on a nearby road an abandoned house, its windows and doors open to the weather.

As any 13–year-old might do, he ventured inside and began looking around. Everything was in place as if the people had just left. Before long he’d found photos and postcards, letters and other papers, even a small leather-bound diary. And as a 13-year-old might do, he took the stuff – nobody seemed to want it, he told himself.

He put it all into a J.C. Penney shoebox and carried it back to California when his family returned home. Fast forward 52 years. The boy, now a man, has just retired, and one of the first things he does is what he’s promised himself all along – he figures out how to return the box of things from the old house to Lincolnville where it belongs.

A call to the town office puts him in touch with the Lincolnville Historical Society, and he learns they’d be delighted to have the contents of the box. And so it is that we can show you these things from the empty and abandoned home of A.I. Young, Slab City Road.

Then Krystal Coombs, an active horsewoman in town, found herself laid up one recent winter with a broken ankle. When she read a notice in the Lincolnville Bulletin Board looking for someone to transcribe the diary, she replied right away that she had the time and would take it on. Thanks to these two people, one for rescuing the diary and one for transcribing it, we know much more about the man who saddled up his cow and rode her in parades.